Signs and Portents, an anniversary

Fourteen years ago, Partner and I got married in a coffee shop in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I highly recommend family-owned coffee shops as fabulous places in general, but they also make great venues for impromptu nuptuals. This particular shop was called Sky’s the Limit Coffee & Bakery, and was run by Mark and Jennifer. Good people. The building was a converted gas station, I think, and the customer area was divided into a main room and an overflow area. The overflow room had a giant plate glass window facing Main Street. We gathered there with a few friends and family members and got married in front of that window.

The store was decorated with quilt-hangings and vaguely tribal-looking art, and painted in cheerful colors. While the pastor made introductory remarks, Partner and I stood in the kitchen, holding hands and laughing nervously. We were also admiring the kitchen equipment. You’ve got to love giant mixing bowls. My favorite part of the shop, besides the apricot coffee cake, lovingly made by Jennifer with apricots picked fresh from her tree, were the quirky signs and posters hanging here and there. I have snapshots of just a few of them, and whenever I see them, I always marvel at how well these work together as prophecies of marriage. 

A movie poster from Straight to Hell, “A story of blood, money, guns, coffee, & sexual tension”No marriage, no matter how congenial, is without a little hell, right? This poster was hanging on the side of a large stainless steel fridge, purchased at a discount because of the giant, claw-like scratch down that side. The poster didn’t quite cover the scratches, so they peeked out from under the poster like a demon was trying to escape from the fridge. 

Danger: Monkeys BiteThis sign was on a bit of wall between some cooling racks. I’m not sure if the monkeys were in the ovens or just hanging around the kitchen. Our Sonars didn’t come along for several years, but once they did, we started referring to them as monkeys pretty regularly. They don’t bite anymore. Much.

The Sky’s the Limit MenuI love this little time capsule of economics and coffee preferences. You know you want a Jolt Cola.

Yes, I highly recommend coffee shops for getting coffee and getting married. Bookstores would be good too. What do you say, babe? Next time let’s get married in a bookstore. I know just the one.

Baby Oil is my new best friend

The next time you’re cleaning up after staining fine wood furniture, or even cheap wood furniture, and you find yourself fresh out of mineral spirits, take heart, a solution is at hand.  Ahem.  

Today, with my hands covered in brown stain, and a brush in the same condition, I pondered clean-up solutions.  No mineral spirits, per stain label instructions.  I thought of the last time we needed to get off some of the sticky goop left behind by medical tape.  Rubbing alcohol required too much rubbing.   But baby oil takes off the adhesive very easily, and near a fresh wound doesn’t risk screaming pain.  

If you want to know why wood stain made me think of tape adhesive, well, it’s in the chemistry of it all.  The adhesive and the wood stain both have oily, or at least hydrophobic compounds in them.  

So.  I dug out a bottle of baby oil that is as old as at least one of my children, maybe more.   I doused both hands with the oil and rubbed it in.  Then I rubbed in a great glop of dish soap before putting them under the running water.  It worked better when I waited on the water.  And it worked great for my brushes too.  

The hydrophobic stain, bonded with the hydrophobic baby oil.  But that alone wasn’t enough, it merely spread out the stain in a more even coating on my hands.  When I tried to rinse that away, the water just sheeted off (because the water and the stain said, eek! water, get it off!).  So, I needed the magic of soap, which has both hydrophobic parts and hydrophilic (mmm,  water) parts and can form micelles that carry off…. what?  Too much chemistry?  

Ok, anyway, it worked really well.  And left my skin soft to boot.  Later, I took the baby oil and dish soap into the shower to get the spots off of my arms, shoulders, neck and cheek.  Take note, the baby oil and soap will not remove the bruise on your thigh that you got when the rocking horse runner slammed into it yesterday but you forgot about and thought was a splotch of stain that had soaked through your old (favorite) jeans, no matter how much you scrub before you realize it is actually just a bruise and not stain.  Do be careful though, the floor of the tub/shower will be slippery when you’re done.  Leave a note for the next person.  Or better yet, rub the floor of the tub/shower with a soapy rag.  

The stain was for the twenty-one (!), four-foot shelves that were cut, sanded and stained today (their supports were assembled yesterday and stained today as well), that will go on this wall of our living room.  

Or perhaps this one (if I move all of that other stuff).  Notice how for one wall I will have to move stuff but for the other one I won’t.  (Also, please notice on the back of the couch the two-tone blue afghan that my mother-in-law gave me for Christmas.  I love it.  Ok, maybe you can’t so much see it in this picture, but it’s lovely and she had to weave in a bazillion ends in the crocheted hounds tooth pattern, for which I think she is the most lovely person because I know how much work that can be.  Also notice our lovely antennae job, imitating speaker wire thumb-tacked on the wall and stretching across the room.  Oh no, wait, DON’T notice that.)  

Wait, That's not right

When we clean a toilet, we *really* clean a toilet.  

The All Clear

The Hurricane is over.  Everyone return to your regularly scheduled sweating.  

Here is the extent of our damage:

Please note that this thirty-foot section of fence separating our back yard from our right-hand neighbor’s back yard was completely rotten prior to Hurricane Dolly.  She just finished off two boards.  We thought briefly about going out during the worst of the wind and pushing down the rest of it. 

But then we started doing this.   Can anyone guess what we’re using for tile spacers (because we were too cheap to shell out the $2.39 for a bag of fifty spacers so that we could set six tiles)?

Renovations

We’ve lived in this house for more than three years.  We’ve made a few changes here and there as time has gone by.  

In the bedrooms, we painted, ripped out nasty old carpet and put in laminate floors (yes, we touched up the trim).

We took down the ceiling “decor” in the living room.  (Yeah, I don’t know why they did that either, but then, we painted our bedrooms orange and yellow, so…)  

Just this week we finally got around to fixing the hall.  I don’t have any photos, but there was a wallpaper border (The hall border).  And the walls were taupe.  Ick.  Before they were taupe, the walls were this color, with trim this color.  Yummy, huh?  

Well, we took about six partial gallons of whitish paint that have been languishing in the garage (only one of them was ours) and mixed them together to get a lovely, buttery, eggshell color of whitishness.  And painted all of that drab taupey color.  Oh, plus the inside of the front door is now Royal Blue (per sonars, who did not want me to paint it “that sick green” as in Barf green). 

The kitchen border used to look like this, but it is no more.  

And now the brick benchey thing that used to be in front of the fireplace and living room window is gone.  (See the post from yesterday for pics.)

We figured there was some kind of 2x4 frame in there supporting a brick facade.  Turns out there were eight million bricks stacked in there, though only the outside layer was mortared.  It took a masonry chisel, a three pound hammer, three hours and a lot of banging (watch iiiit), but Partner ripped out the whole thing down to the fireplace face (good thing that went to the floor, huh?).  

Now we’re not sure what we want to do.  The window there has some rot under it and so we may reframe it.  Or we might put in a sliding glass door.  There’s a sort of double door on the other side of the fireplace that we’d like to turn into a sliding door too.  We’d have a lot of window out onto a patio.  Whuddya think?  

Oh, and here’s another picture I was trying to post last night.  Sonar X8’s desk, inspired by this.  But now it sort of reminds me of a comfy pair of blue jeans.  

And here’s the boy reading the classics.  

 He was smaller then.